Simply put, web personalization is the process by which a website can create unique experiences for visitors. It streamlines content for the visitors such that they only receive information relevant to them, instead of being presented with a broad spectrum of information that may not be relevant to their needs. In doing so, web personalization creates a curated experience solely for the visitor.

Web personalization is a field of growing importance as customers have less attention span and want to feel special and rewarded for their loyalty. They no longer want to sift through pages and pages of content to find something pertinent to them. The onus of finding relevant, timely and contextual information is now on the organization rather than the individual, and hence web personalization is critical in this day and age.

The feature of web personalization is especially important with regards to the credit union industry as seen from the findings in 2016 Credit Union Customer Survey conducted by TimeTrade. The results showed that credit union customers ranked personalization as their top priority and that over 85% of credit union respondents felt like they had a personalized experience with their credit union.

Therefore, having a personalized Web experience for customers is a necessity for credit unions to survive today. Here are the best web personalization tools your credit union company can use to ensure that it keeps up with the personalized demands of customers –

1. SiteSpect

SiteSpect is one of the world’s leading patented platforms that was created specifically to provide the most accurate and accessible web personalization services possible. A customer’s entire experience is customized all the way from the front end to the backend to ensure as much curation as possible.

SiteSpects services have a ton of useful, innovative features that will assist any organization that is set on improving its personalized experiences for their customers.

Here are a few of the features present –

Full A/B and multivariate capabilities to ensure optimum content selection and presentation.

2. Adobe

Adobe provides a collection of tools that were developed to ensure that a website can offer personalized experiences to each of its customers while also ensuring greater control and accessibility towards analyzing customer trends and preferences. It is a one-stop tool to combat all the challenges that web personalization brings to an organization.

Here are a few of the many features that Adobe offers to its clients-

Adobe Analytics–Offers clients complete access to unprecedented levels of customer trend analysis with regard to their preferences and insights.

Adobe Audience Manager – Allows companies to bring together vast amounts of customer data to create customer profiles based on interest and values- thereby enabling organizations to provide targeted content to these groups.

Adobe Target – Allows an organization to personalize their website such that it can conduct customer- targeted tests through many forms that enable greater insight into customer behavior.

Adobe Campaign – Allows your organization to gain an understanding of what customers respond to, their interactions and their purchases. All of this will assist in building an even greater personalized platform to cater to your customers' needs.

3. Visual Website Optimizer

VWO is an all-encompassing platform to sort out your company’s A/B Testing needs and subsequent web personalization. Using state-of-the-art software, VWO allows you to access vast amounts of customer-related data in a fraction of time to assist you in being more well informed with customer needs and desires.

Some of VWO’s web-personalization focused features are –

Unmatched technology with their unique SmartCode which ensures that your website never slows down even with all the analytical background processes occurring.

VWO offers a multitude of integrations with third-party applications.

A multitude of analytical tools to measure underperforming aspects of the website such as Heat Maps, Conversion Opportunities and, Website Element Analysis.

Highly efficient A/B and Multivariate Testing features coupled with a thorough demographic analysis.

4. Optimizely

Optimizely is one of the world’s leaders when it comes to the field of web personalization. With glowing customer reviews and industry-leading Stats Engine, Optimizely allows clients to have all the data they need to craft an impeccable web personalized service for their customers wherein they receive targeted content as and when they need to.

These are just a few of Optimizely’s many features –

Real-time updates concerning behavior targeting and customer trends.

Overlapping audiences can be dealt quickly in order to separate statistics for different measures.

Unlike many other tools, Optimizely is mobile compatible as well as web compatible.

5. Monetate

Monetate is another web personalization tool that will significantly assist your business in constructing personalized experience for your customers. With their Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine, this tool will allow you to have complete control over all aspects of customer experience-centric processes.

This tool will enable you to identify the most applicable solutions and thereby increase conversions. It is also the leading personalization tool wherein it services more IR500 Brands then any other platform.

The features that Monetate brings are –

Open architecture system present in the Personalization Engine which allows greater control in connecting various data sources to come up with the most holistic portrait of customer needs and desires.

The capability to analyze over a million data points in just a second. The Artificial Intelligence personalization engine sorts out relevant information itself and provides only valuable information to further conversion or AOV for your company.

Omnichannel support to connect to any channel via API or server-side integration.

A/B Testing and Segmentation to allow for identification of high-value audiences as well as testing for the most appropriate digital asset.

6. Oracle Maxymiser

Oracle Maxymiser is a part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud – one of the world’s leading Marketing tools. Maxymiser is a tool that is geared towards companies identifying and employing the most at experiences for their customers across all media.

Insights into customer behavior are achieved through Maxymiser's unparalleled personalization capabilities that are mentioned below –

Final Thoughts

Therefore, we can see that web personalization tools are an essential part for any company in this digital age. These are tools that allow your organization to target what customers want and need – a personalized experience. This, in turn, will benefit not only the customers but the business in the long run as it allows for a more measured and efficient layout to drive up sales and conversions while increasing customer satisfaction as well.

Proof of this can be seen in a study by Monetate wherein 79% of all surveyed organizations that managed to exceed revenue goals went on to document personalization strategy as a core tenet, compared to 31% of organizations that met their revenue goals and only 8% of organizations that missed their revenue goals. Therefore, implementation of a personalization strategy resulted in a very high chance of high returns for the company. It is an investment your organization must make to take itself to the next level.

Comments

The best implementations of personalization on our external websites necessarily require users to identify themselves. It's how we link member-visitors to the rich profiles we've constructed in our data warehouses. Our websites can accomplish this identification task [1] by having users actively log into the external website (distinct from online banking), or [2] by having users passively accept some sort of persistent tracking cookie or similar (Flash shared object). Both are problematic. It's woefully unrealistic to think many users will bother with the former, and users -- and their antivirus tools -- are unfortunately hostile to the latter.

I've not heard of any credit union who's successfully implemented either strategy on their external (public-facing) website. It's interesting to imagine that a really, really good implementation of personalization would deliver so much incredible value and so little risk to privacy that users would be thrilled to engage the extra steps of logging into our websites the second they hit our homepages, or they'd gladly whitelist any cookies we wanted to use to track them. But that's overly wishful thinking, isn't it.

The alternative? Channel our personalization energies to the experience INSIDE online banking (and, similarly, mobile banking). Security concerns are such that everyone has an absolute expectation of logging into that experience, and that act can be used to link the user with a rich data profile and within that session we can present content with full knowledge of the member's interests, depth of relationship, etc. Easy, theoretically. All the accounts and balances information located in online banking is radically personalized. So why not offer other information — credit union news, promotional offers, operational advice, service improvement tools, and more — alongside all those accounts and balances INSIDE online banking? If I had a tab within online banking where I could get announcements of upcoming credit union workshops that served my particular interests (matching the workshop preference checkboxes I'd previously checked), and not those that don't, wouldn't I gladly click on that tab from time to time? I'd like to think I would.

It's all cold comfort for non-members checking us out. But oh, how nice it'd be to at least take the member experience to a new level.

But we don't do that. We have a non-personalized list of credit union workshops on our external website, ignorant of what I may have told the CU is interesting to me and what's not.

Here's the problem. Personalized non-banking content is an afterthought to many/most online banking vendors, to my knowledge. To its credit, Alkami introduced the rudiments of an inside-online banking content management system years ago, but then gave it very limited attention in the years since. Can it leverage intelligence harvested from our sophisticated data warehouse — the repository with the broadest view of member relationships and interests? Not readily. It's designed to offer very limited tailoring of content based on what humble subset of data the online banking system has visibility to. No awareness that a member recently applied for our credit card. No awareness that a member's PIN misfired eight times at an ATM yesterday. No awareness that the member has explicitly requested that we don't talk to them about certificates, despite their seeming good fit.

No disrespect at all meant to what Medhavi has gathered and shared above. Perhaps these solutions do open doors to personalization on some level. But what would be even more helpful, I suspect, is a list of which online banking vendors deliver personalization best. Which can consume profile data from our comprehensive DW sources (not just their own), then give us a range of vehicles to present personalized value to back to members, not just A/B versioning of a couple different banner ads. I have to think that's lowest-hanging fruit to improve personalized experiences. No?

If anyone has found a way around these challenges and is moving full steam ahead with online personalization -- inside or outside online/mobile banking -- please chime in!